


life over limb

by larkgrace



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, also jane knows cpr because maid of life, jake is temporarily dead, just go with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkgrace/pseuds/larkgrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, it's a case of life over limb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	life over limb

You spent your childhood years preparing yourself for the game—wrestling, swordplay, endurance training. You remember swimming until you couldn’t climb back up to your apartment, sleeping in the boat tethered to one of the supporting rails and waking with aching muscles and going again, for three days until you couldn’t feel the lactic acid burning in your limbs anymore. Roxy had been pissed for that—she called it a stupid stunt, half-drowning yourself in the middle of nowhere. This coming from the girl who spent eleven of her sixteen waking hours drunk, but you hadn’t mentioned it.

You’d both trained yourselves in basic first aid, Roxy with her mother’s books and you with the last dregs of the internet. Most of it you couldn’t perform on yourselves, but you both knew you’d need it someday.

*#*#*

You have nightmares about the first time you saved Jake.

Actually, you hadn’t been able to save him in the first place, which scared you more than anything else. He’d fallen and he’d stayed down, and with hands covered in dried blood and dirt and machine oil you had pulled his mouth to your ear to listen for breathing, but there was nothing. You’d pressed your fingers into his neck hard enough to leave a bruise, and found maybe a pulse, but wishful thinking couldn’t be trusted and you’d yelled for help (before you’d hurt your friends so badly they couldn’t stand to be on the same planet as you, before they’d left you alone again).

His dream self was dead and his quest bed was useless and his heart was stopped and your hands were already throwing his arm back so you could kneel with your knees flush against his ribcage. Jane and Roxy were already there, already watching you center your hands between his ribs and shove.

_(Two inch compression depth; he was an adult now, he’d seen more adventure than his childhood self could have dreamed of, it was wearing him down.)_

On the twelfth compression you’d felt his rib crack. That was fine. You kept going. On the twenty-sixth it broke completely, and then you hit thirty and Jane—sweet, wonderful Jane—tilted his head back, hyperextended his spine, breathed poison into his lungs to make his chest rise and fall. You went back to compressions, and Roxy’s voice kept a steady pace _(one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand)_ in a monotone that Jane echoed, everyone’s eyes on your hands.

Again Jane had forced his jaw open with her fingers, rough enough to leave marks, and you’d muttered “Breathe, breathe,” with Roxy, not sure if it was a reflex or a prayer.

Jake didn’t move.

Two rounds later Roxy had taken over for you, her arms straining while you switched places with Jane to relieve your aching arms. You’d dug your fingers into the _L_ curves at his jaw, pressed your mouth against his as hard as you could to seal it, and exhaled eighty-five percent carbon dioxide into his lungs until his chest rose twice. You’d brushed your fingers through his hair and checked his wrist for a pulse—unnecessary, and absent.

Ten rounds, three hundred compressions, four more rib cracks, two trades and five minutes later, he’d come coughing and spluttering back to life under your hands. You’d helped Roxy and Jane roll him onto his side with his head pillowed on his arm so he wouldn’t choke to death on his own vomit.

(You did this again, two days later, when you found Roxy passed out with a bottle in her hand, the first time she’d touched alcohol since the game started—and you couldn’t blame her for trying to forget.)

Jane had put her head between her knees for a long time, and only emerged from her skirt once Jake had started crying, clutching at his chest where you’d broken his ribs. It would take him six weeks to take a deep breath without wincing. (It would take him two to try to thank you, and you begged him not to mention it, and both went to bed that night shaking.)

You’d held his hand and told him he was alive, and what all of you did to make it that way, and that night the girls had sacked out on the ground and Jake had whimpered in his sleep and you’d borrowed one of his pistols and shot anything that moved. Save a life, blow a lizard skeleton’s head off. All in a day’s work. You were amazed you could hit anything with your shaking hands.

The next afternoon you’d helped him limp back to his house and laid him on his bed, where he stayed sobbing and coughing for the rest of the day, too overwhelmed with pain to move, and between glasses of water you made him choke down you curled up with him and watched the sun slink across the sky. You’d cupped the side of his face with your hand, run your fingers through the wisps of hair above his ear, felt his heartbeat jumping against your thumb.

He wasn’t okay. But he was alive.

So were you.

**Author's Note:**

> usually, cpr won't revive someone in cardiac arrest, but hey, it could happen.
> 
> also--i shouldn't have to say this, because it's common sense, but do NOT attempt to perform cpr without proper certification, and NEVER get in the way of responding rescuers. just call 911 and let people who know what they're doing do their jobs.


End file.
